Mids and high recommendations for Tahoe

[GoT_2B_BuMpiN]

hey all...I've got an 09 Tahoe and am looking for some Mids and highs advice.  I am going to be making custom door pods and A pillar pods. I'm thinking maybe (2) 6.5 & (2) 3.5  in each door.  And something in A pillars. I'd like to have something loud that sounds decent.  I've been looking at some DS18 and CT sounds Meso and Skar installs and like some. I'm looking for same or similar. Any suggestions on setup and Amp? I am installing my 2 Sundown 15s in custom enclosure with Sundown SFB 2000W Amp this coming week. Then next is mids and highs. I want to get speakers and ampbefore I begin building the door pods.

[TheBKG]

Mids and Highs is where the Subjectivity of Sound comes into play more than anywhere else.  Ask 20 ppl and your going to get 20 different answers.  The Best answer is to go find stores and install shops that carry speakers your looking at and go listen to them.  Thats the best way to figure out what you like and don't like.  Any other method risks spending money on and installing speakers you end up dissatisfied with.  Ultimately you risk loosing money. 

 

For example there are nearly a dozen different Tweeter cone materials that fall into one of two categories:  Hard or Soft Dome.  Only listening to them will determine what makes you happy.  And to quote a well known HiFi Reviewer Andrew Robinson, at the end of the day the only person who has to be happy with the sound of your system is You. 

 

I always recommend using tracks with certain elements that will reveal exactly how speakers will sound and test their ability to accurately reproduce.  Those elements are a good quality Male Vocalist, true Piano (not a synth) is difficult to reproduce and absolutely separates decent speakers and below from truly good ones, and a mix of Trumpet and String instruments will tell you exactly whats happening in the high frequencies.  Yes I know no one here listens to that kind of music, but they are excellent tests of not only how the speakers will sound and the quality of their reproduction, but especially in terms of the high frequencies you can quickly determine if you'd be able to listen to them for hours or if listener fatigue is likely to become an issue.  If they sound harsh playing good brass instruments then even if they seem ok with the music you listen to all the time there's a strong possibility that after 45 minutes to an hour you'll find yourself turning them down or off without knowing why you didn't want to listen anymore. 

 

Now, what we can absolutely discuss is your choices in speaker placement.  2 questions, how important is Imagery/Sound Staging to you, and are you going to be using a full featured DSP? 

[Ron36]

I’ve always ran Alpine Type R’s for mids , they never let me  down and don’t have huge magnets that can interfere with the window.  I just bought some Skar Audio TSX 5.25’s  for my beater car and gonna amp them up next weekend. They look pretty nice. 

[GoT_2B_BuMpiN]

I am thinking of going with skar.  Ive got 4 of the 3.5 super tweeters. I hooked them up with just head unit power and they werent very loud. I need to amplify them. Im new to car audio for the most part so I try to find diagrams and stuff online. I am basically trying to figure out how I need to wire everything up if I have dual 6.5 in doors with dual 3.5 on A pillars. Also the only amps I have are a 2 channel JENSEN from walmart and a 4 channel JENSEN from walmart. lol...they were gifts.

[Dafaseles]

You can use just the 4 channel by wiring each pair of 6.5's parallel together for a final 2 ohm impedance. Putting a pair on channel 1 and a pair on channel 2. Then doing the same with the tweeters on 3 and 4.

Or, you can use both amps. Wiring each 6.5 to its own channel on the 4 channel, then using the 2 channel for the tweeters, wiring them in parallel like in the last paragraph (or vice versa with each tweeter getting it's own channel and using the 2 channel amp for the 6.5's.)

The only worry is how are you going to cross them over correctly? I'm assuming your subwoofers are going to play up to, say, 80 hz. So in that situation, you'd want your 6.5's to play from say 100 hz or so, to about 4000 hz or so. Then your tweeters would take over for 4000 hz up to 20khz.

If you send too low of a frequency through your 6.5's and your tweeters, you'll end up blowing them, and if you send a frequency to high through your 6.5's, you'll get what's called "beaming", (without getting into too much detail, it sounds like shit.)